The present invention relates in general to sleeve grinding and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for simultaneously grinding multiple axially aligned sleeves. While the present invention is generally applicable to sleeve grinding, it is particularly applicable to grinding cylinder liners for internal combustion engines and will be described herein with reference to this application. Accordingly, sleeve and liner may be used interchangeably herein.
Currently, cylinder liners for internal combustion engines are ground one liner at a time. A liner to be ground is mounted onto an arbor and a rotating grinding wheel is moved into engagement with the outside of the cylinder liner, which is also rotating, until the cylinder liner is ground to a precision outer diameter. The outer diameter is critical for proper placement in an engine block. The prior art grinding wheels are mounted to a sliding bed or are pivotally mounted for movement into engagement with the cylinder liner and are cantilever supported such that the size of the grinding wheel and hence the number of cylinder liners which can be ground at one time is limited.
Accordingly, there is a need to simultaneously grind multiple cylinder liners for increased production and reduced cost. For optimizing the cylinder liner grinding operation, preferably the cylinder liners would be automatically handled by a compact sleeve handling system which loads unfinished liners to be ground, removes finished liners after grinding, gauges the finished liners, transports acceptably ground liners to an acceptable liner area and rejects the occasional liner which is unacceptably ground by the grinding operation. Also, the grinding wheel of the grinding system should be dressed on a periodic basis to provide better performance from the grinding machine.